


Rust-Red

by Linden



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-20
Updated: 2015-09-20
Packaged: 2018-04-17 04:58:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4653243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linden/pseuds/Linden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was the first law of hunting, and as immutable as anything Dean knew: sometimes, civilians died.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rust-Red

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [【授权翻译】Rust-Red/锈红](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5065354) by [Milfoil_c](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Milfoil_c/pseuds/Milfoil_c)



> This is just a drabble, set sometime in late autumn when Dean is twenty-one or twenty-two.

Dean stood bloody in the chilly autumn night, watching the Rosser house burn.  In it were the broken, salted bodies of the two little girls that its vengeful ghost had killed.

Laying them out had been the last thing he’d done, while Caleb had smudged out their tire tracks and loaded their weapons and shovels back into their cars. He'd had no prayers to say over them, like Jim would have, but he’d carried them down one by one from that broken, horrid upstairs hall, their bodies wet and impossibly light in his arms; set them down gently in the center of the living room floor; tried his best to straighten their legs, to wipe the blood from their faces, pretty and small. He’d stood over them with a book of matches for a long moment after, hands shaking, the scent of blood and salt and gasoline sharp in his nose. He hadn’t wanted to set them alight. Not with their skinny little limbs and matching My Little Pony tee-shirts; not with their big, unseeing hazel eyes ( _Sammy’s eyes; Jesus, they’d had Sammy’s eyes_ ) and soft dark hair. But there had been good reason to burn them, and he’d known it, always had: left unpurified, kids who died bloody almost always came back, and when they did, they came back wrong.

He knew that. He did. Knowing hadn’t made it any easier. The older girl couldn’t have been more than nine, and she had died with her arms wrapped tight around her sister, the little one’s head tucked beneath her chin, trying to protect her from the thing that had killed them both.

If he and Caleb had gotten here half an hour earlier, they might still be alive.

‘Dean!’ Caleb called now, from the other side of the yard, beside both their cars, and Dean could hear fire sirens in the distance. The town was seven miles out and the nearest neighbor three miles away, but the Rosser place was on a hill, and the house was lit up like a bonfire against the autumn sky. Someone had seen the flames, clearly; someone had called; someone was coming.

The fire leapt, roaring, burning out whatever evil had seeped into the walls of that house, scouring the earth beneath it clean.

The girls’ blood was sticky on his hands.

***

Sam looked up from his homework, smiling, when Dean came in to their crap room in their crap motel a few minutes after midnight; he was out of his chair, wide-eyed, half a heartbeat later. ‘ _Dean_ ,’ he said, and Dean was fairly certain he had never seen his brother’s face change that fast before. For a moment all he wanted was to just push Sam down onto their warm messy bed, to just crawl on top of him and tuck his face into the crook of the kid’s neck and breathe, until he couldn’t smell death or smoke or gasoline or anything except his little brother, but— ‘Dean, Jesus, man, what the—’

‘It ain't mine,’ he told him, quietly, wearily, elbowing him away as the kid tried to get frantic hands on him and check for injuries. Blood had dried gummy and rust-red beneath his nails, in the lines of his palms, on his arms, on his shirt; he couldn’t touch Sammy like this, wouldn’t. He moved past him toward the bathroom. ‘I’m fine, Sam. I just need to clean up, all right? I’ll be out in a little bit.’

He was shaking, just a little, shoulders to heels, and he couldn’t get himself to stop.

***

He was still shaking ten minutes later, only worse and more so, with his skin scrubbed pink and stinging, and his teeth chattering, and a chill in his bones that the hot water was doing nothing to ease. The red had washed down the drain with the soap suds and the dirt, but he could still—he could still _see_ —

He pushed his hands back through his hair, closed his eyes beneath the spray. He was just tired, he told himself. He was just tired; that’s all this was; he just needed to get some food in his stomach and sleep for a few hours, maybe see if he could get their dad on the phone to find out where the fuck he was, and he'd be—

Behind him there was the soft sudden rattle of shower curtain rings sliding along the bar, and then a wash of cold air and the rattle of the rings sliding back, and then lean familiar hands were on his wet hips, and a slim, stupidly tall body was pressing up warm against his back, and Sam was winding strong slim arms around him, tucking him in close—one arm across his chest, the other around his waist, the same way Dean had used to hold him when they’d both been kids, whenever the two of them had stood together in the middle of the night at their motel window, looking out into the dark as they waited for their father to come home.

He wondered, briefly, if he’d ever made Sam feel half as safe.

He should have put an elbow in his brother's ribs, he knew, should have demanded to know if the kid had forgotten how to knock, should have said something teasing about the fact that they were both of them naked and wet and Sam was soft against the curve of his ass.  He closed his eyes instead, and brought his hands up to settle on Sam’s forearms, gripping tight.

‘You wanna tell me?’ his brother asked him, quietly, and Dean shook his head, throat suddenly too tight to speak. Sam said nothing else, just nodded and tucked his smooth cheek against Dean’s rough one and stayed wrapped around him like a baby monkey, like a blanket, like a shield, and if after a minute Dean let his head tip back a little against his little brother’s shoulder, if he let Sam take a little of his weight, well—it was just that he was tired, he was so tired, and Sammy was so warm, and he just—he just needed this, just for a little while.

‘I’m all right,’ he managed after another minute or two, and Sam tightened his arms around him, pressed a kiss to his throat.

‘I know,’ he replied, softly, and they stayed there together, beneath the warm wet spray, for a long, long while.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Interlude](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4873855) by [Fenix21](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fenix21/pseuds/Fenix21)




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